THE PLAYS
Three plays belong to Shakespeare's first period of original creative
writing. It is fair to suppose that the least dramatically sound of the
three was the one first written. We therefore take _Love's Labour's
Lost_ as his first play. It is commonly said by critics that _Love's
Labour's Lost_ is "the work of a young man." It might more justly be
said of it that it is the work of a new kind of young man. The young man
knows all the trick of the theatre and uses it, as a master always uses
technique, for the statement of something new to the human soul. The
play no longer speaks to the human soul; for though it is the work of a
master, it is the work of a master not yet alive to the depths and still
doubtful among the temptations to which intellect is subject. It is one
of those works of art which remind us of Blake's saying, that "the best
water is the newest." When it came out, with all the glitter of newness
on it, the mind of man was flattered by a new possession. To us, the
persons of the play are not much more than Time's toys, who never really
lived, but only glittered a little.
_Love's Labour's Lost._
_Written._ Between 1589 and 1592.
_Published_, after correction and augmentation, from a badly
corrected copy, 1598.
_Source of the Plot._ It is thought that Shakespeare created the
plot. The names of some of the characters were taken from people
then living. The incident in Act V, scene ii (the entrance of the
King of Navarre and his men, in Russian habits), was perhaps
suggested by the visit of some Russians to Queen Elizabeth in 1584.
_The Fable._ The King of Navarre and his three courtiers, Biron,
Dumaine and Longaville, have sworn to study for three years under
the usual collegiate conditions of watching, fasting, and keeping
from the sight and speech of women. They are forced to break this
vow. The Princess of France comes with her Court to discuss State
affairs.
At the discussion, the King falls in love with the Princess, his
three courtiers fall in love with the ladies of her train.
The lovers send vows of love to their ladies. They plot to visit
them in disguises of masks and Russian clothes. The ladies, hearing
of this plot in time, mask themselves. The men fail to recognise
them. Each disguised lover makes love-vows to the wrong woman.
The ladies twit the men with a double perjury: that they have
broken their vow to study, and their love vows.
The play is kept within the bounds of fantastic comedy by the
members of the sub-plot, who intrude with their fun whenever the
action tends to become real. They intrude here, to impersonate the
Nine Worthies before the two Courts. The farce of their performance
is heightened by ragging from the courtiers. When it is at its
height, two of the members of the sub-plot begin to quarrel. One
blow would ruin the play by making it real. At the crisis the
violence is avoided; the reality is brought unexpectedly, by
beauty. A messenger enters to tell the Princess that her father is
dead.
The ladies bid the men test their love by waiting for twelve
months. The trifling of the earlier acts is shown at its moral
value against a background of tragic happening. Accomplishments are
compared with life.
The members of the sub-plot enter. They end the play with the
singing of a lyric.
The play gives the reader the uncanny feeling that something real inside
the piece is trying to get out of the fantasy. The lip-love rattles like
a skeleton's bones. The love of Biron for Rosaline is real passion. The
conflict throughout is the conflict of the unreal with the real.
The play seems to have been written in a literary or sentimental mood,
and revised in a real mood. There is little in the early version that is
not fantastic. The situation is fantastic, the people are fantastic, the
language is fantastic with all a brilliant young master's delight in the
play and glitter of cunning writing. The later version was written
during the passionate years of Shakespeare's growth, after something had
altered the world to him. The two versions are carelessly stuck
together, with the effect of a rose-bush growing out of bones.
The Biron scenes, as we have them, seem to be the fruit of the mood that
caused the sonnets. We do not know what caused that mood. The sonnets,
like the plays, are as likely to be symbol as confession. The sonnets
suggest that he loved an unworthy woman who robbed him of a beloved
friend. _Love's Labour's Lost_ and several other early plays suggest
that he knew too well how love for the unworthy woman smirches honour,
wakens, but holds captive, the reason, and wastes the spiritual gift in
the praise of a form of death.
The dramatic method is dual. He presents in the plot something eternal
in human life, and in the sub-plot something temporal in human fashion.
In the plot of this play, his intention seems to have been this--to show
intellect turned from a high resolve, from a consecration to mental
labour, by the coming of women, who represent, perhaps, untutored,
natural intelligence. Later in the play the high resolve of intellect is
betrayed again, indirectly by women; but more by the sexual emotions
which distort the vision till even the falsest, loosest woman appears
beautiful and "celestial," and worth the sacrifice of intellect. The end
of the play is not so much an end as a clearing of the road of life.
It often happens that the setting down of a doubt in careful words
resolves it. This play seems to free Shakespeare's mind from doubts as
to the right use and preparation of intellect. He presents with extreme
care the different types of literary intellect: the man who shuts
himself up to study, the man who sparkles in society, the man whom books
have made stupid and the man whom style has made mad.
The play is full of the problem of what to do with the mind. Shall it be
filled with study, or spent in society, or burnt in a passion, or
tortured by strivings for style, or left as it is? Intellect is a
problem to itself. Something of the problem seems (it would be wrong to
be more certain) to have made this play not quite impersonal, as good
art should be.
The problems are settled wisely, though not without a feeling of
sacrifice. The beauty and the worth of learning are baits by which many
intellects are lured from wisdom. The knowledge that life is the book to
study, life at its liveliest, in the wits of women
"Keen
Above the sense of sense,"
and that style is a poor thing beside the "honest plain words" which
pierce, only comes with a sense of loss. Youth desires all the powers. A
man with great gifts desires all the mental gifts. Youth with nothing
but great gifts is never sure that the gifts will be sufficient. When
this play was written, the stage was supplied with plays by men of
trained intellects, who set more store upon the training than upon the
intellect itself. The society of well-taught men, who know and quote and
criticise, always makes the untaught uncertain and ill at ease.
Shakespeare seems to have risen from the writing of this play, certain
that poetry is not given to the trained mind, nor to the untrained mind,
but to the quick and noble nature, earnest with the passion which stands
the touchstone of death. "Subtlety," so Cromwell wrote, "may deceive
you, integrity never will." The mind is her own armour. She will not
fail for the want of a little learning or a little grace.
In the sub-plot, among much low comedy, this truth is emphasised by the
triumph of Costard, a natural mind, in an encounter with Armado, an
artificial mind. At the end of the play the "learned men" are made to
compile a dialogue "in praise of the owl and the cuckoo." The dialogue
is of a kind not usual among learned men, but the choice of the birds is
significant. The last speech of the play: "The words of Mercury are
harsh after the songs of Apollo," seems to refer to Marlowe, as though
Shakespeare found it hard to justify an art so unlike his master's.
Marlowe climbs the peaks in the sun, his bow never off his shoulders. I
walk the roads of the earth among men.
There is little character drawing in the piece. The Princess is a
gracious figure; but hardly real to us till the last scene of the play,
when she speaks wisely. Biron is more of a person. He presents his point
of view in a moment of pleasant poetry--
"For where is any author in the world,
Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?"
He shows a prejudice against Boyet, the courtier in attendance on the
Princess. This prejudice is expressed bitterly--
"This is the flower that smiles on every one,"
with the bitterness usual in Shakespeare when treating of the flunkey
mind. The ladies of the Princess's train all talk exactly alike, with
sharp feminine wit, infinitely swift in thrust. None of them has
personality; but Rosaline is described for us, body and disposition. The
members of the sub-plot are mental fashions well observed. Costard alone
has life. Shakespeare came from the country. In the country a thinking
man is reminded daily of the shrewdness of unspoiled minds. Armado,
Costard's opponent, lives for us by one phrase--
"The sweet war-man is dead and rotten: sweet chucks, beat not the
bones of the buried: when he breathed, he was a man."
It is interesting to see Shakespeare's mind trying for vividness. In his
maturity he had supremely the power of giving life. In this early play
one can see his first conscious literary efforts towards the obtaining
of the power. Longaville (in Act II, sc. i) makes the scene alive by the
question--
"I beseech you a word. What is she in the white?"
(Who is the woman in the white dress?) The simple but telling means of
giving reality is repeated a few lines later in Biron's question--
"What's her name in the cap?"
In Act V, sc. ii, the vividness is given in a strangely pathetic
passage, that haunts, after the play is laid down. Two of the ladies are
talking of Cupid--
_Rosaline._ You'll ne'er be friends with him: he killed your
sister.
_Katharine._ He made her melancholy, sad, and heavy;
And so she died: had she been light, like you,
Of such a merry, nimble, stirring spirit,
She might have been a granddam ere she died.
The power of giving life in a line is seen in the remark of Dumaine (Act
IV, sc. iii)--
"To look like her, are chimney-sweepers black."
The play is full of experiments. Some of it is written in a loose,
swinging couplet, some in quatrains, some in blank verse, some in the
choice, picked prose made the fashion by Lyly. It contains more lyrics
than any other Shakespearean play. One of the lyrics, a sonnet in
Alexandrines, is the fruit of a real human passion. The lyric at the end
of the play is the loveliest thing ever said about England. If this play
and most of the other plays were modern works, the Censor would not
allow them to be performed publicly. The men and women converse with a
frankness and suggestiveness not now usual, except among the young.
Shakespeare is blamed for not conforming to standards unknown to his
generation.
He is blamed for not being delicate-minded like the great Greek tragic
poets. The Greek tragic poets wrote about the heroic life of legend.
Shakespeare wrote about life. A man who writes about life must accept
life for what it is, as largely an animal thing. Those who pretend that
life is only lived in boudoirs, are in peril, and the world is in peril
through them.
_The Two Gentlemen of Verona._
_Written._ Before 1592.
_Published_, in the first folio, 1623.
_Source of the Plot._ The story of a woman who follows her lover in
the disguise of a page-boy, hears him serenade another woman, and
acts as a go-between in his suit to this other woman, is to be
found in the second book of _La Diana Enamorada_, a pastoral
romance, in prose, freely sprinkled with lyrics, by Jorge de
Montemayor, a Portuguese who wrote in Spanish about the middle of
the sixteenth century. De Montemayor's story is not complicated by
a Valentine. He calls the girl Felismena, her lover Felix, and the
second woman Celia. His tale ends with Celia dying for love of the
supposed page-boy.
A play based on this story was acted in England in 1584. It is now
lost. The gist of the story was published in lame English verses,
by Barnabe Googe, in 1563.
_The Fable._ Valentine and Proteus, the two gentlemen, are friends.
Valentine is about to travel. Proteus, in love with Julia, will not
go with him. Antonio, Proteus' father, sends Proteus after
Valentine. Julia resolves to follow him in boy's clothes. Valentine
at Milan falls in love with the Duke's daughter, Silvia, whom the
Duke plans to marry to one Thurio. Proteus, arriving at Milan, also
falls in love with Silvia. He becomes jealous of Valentine.
Valentine tells him that he has planned to escape with Silvia that
night. Proteus betrays this plot to the Duke. The Duke banishes
Valentine and sends Proteus to Silvia to press the suit of Thurio.
Valentine joins a gang of outlaws.
Proteus woos Silvia for himself, and is rejected by her.
Julia, who has come in boy's dress from Verona to look for Proteus,
finds him still unsuccessfully courting Silvia. She enters his
service as a page. He sends her on a message to Silvia.
On her way to deliver the message, Julia meets Silvia flying from
home in search of Valentine.
In her search for Valentine, Silvia is caught by the gang of
outlaws.
Proteus rescues her, and threatens to resume his suit with
violence.
Valentine, entering, stops this.
Proteus sues for pardon to Valentine and Julia. He is received to
mercy. The Duke after dismissing Thurio, pardons Valentine, and
grants him Silvia's hand in marriage.
_Love's Labour's Lost_ is fantasy. The _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ deals
with real human relationships. It is a better play than the fantasy,
though the fantasy has moments of better poetry. It carries on one of
the problems raised in _Love's Labour's Lost_. It is the work of a
troubled mind. It comes from the mood in which the sonnets were written.
Twice in _Love's Labour's Lost_ the act of oath-breaking, of being
forsworn, is important to the play's structure. Though the vows broken
in that play are fantastic, the characters feel real dishonour at the
breaking of them. The play shows that though the idea of vow-breaking
was in Shakespeare's mind, he had not then the power, or the human
experience, or the mental peace, to grapple with it fairly, or see it
truly. The idea, that the person for whom the vows are broken brings
with her the punishment of the sin of vow-breaking, haunts the mind of
Biron (in Act IV, sc. iii)--
"Sow'd cockle reap'd no corn:
And justice always whirls in equal measure:
Light wenches may prove plagues to men forsworn."
In the _Two Gentlemen of Verona_, this idea, the idea that treachery
caused by some obsession is at the root of most tragedy, was treated by
him at length, perhaps for the first time.
That it haunted him then, and remained all through his life as the
pole-star of dramatic action is evident to all who read his works as
poetry should be read. It is the law of his imagination.
Passion, not weakness of will, but strength of will blinded, is the
commonest cause of treachery among us. The great poets have agreed that
anything that distorts the mental vision, anything thought of too much,
is a danger to us. Passion that with the glimmer of a new drunkenness
blinds the mature to the life and death memories of marriage, and kills
in the immature the memory of love, friendship, and past benefits, is a
form of destruction. In its action as a destroyer, it is the subject of
Shakespeare's greatest plays. In the _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ he is
interested less in the destruction than in the moral blindness that
leads to it.
Shakespeare's method is simple. He shows us two charming young men
becoming morally blind with passion, in a company not so blinded. The
only other "inconstant" person in the play (Sir Thurio) is inconstant
from that water-like quality in the mind that floods with the full moon,
and ebbs like a neap soon after. Even the members of the sub-plot, the
two servants, are constant, the one to his master, who beats him, the
other to the dog that gets him beaten. A lesser mind would sit in
judgment in such a play. The task of genius is not to sit in judgment.
"Our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together."
Shakespeare neither praises nor blames. His task is to see justly. It is
we who conclude that treachery looks ugly beside its opposite.
Of the fine scenes in the play, sc. iv in Act II, where Valentine and
Sir Thurio walk with Silvia, with whom they are both in love, is the
liveliest. The two men bicker across the lady, as though the next word
would bring blows. The demure pleasure of Silvia in being quarrelled
for, is indicated most masterly in less than thirty words. Act III, sc.
i, where the Duke discovers Valentine's plot to escape with Silvia, is a
passage of noble dramatic power, doubly interesting because it shows the
justice of Shakespeare's vision. Valentine, the constant friend and
lover, is exposed in an act of treachery to his benefactor. The scenes
in which the disguised Julia witnesses her lover's falseness, and the
scene in which the play is brought to an end, are deeply and nobly
affecting. Theatre managers play Shakespeare as though he were an old
fashion of the mind instead of the seer of the eternal in life. They
should play this play as a vision of something that is eternally
treacherous, bringing misery to the faithful, the noble, and the
feeling. One of the noblest things in the play is the forgiveness at the
end. Passion has taken Proteus into strange byways of treachery. He has
been false to Julia, to Valentine, to the Duke, to Thurio, one falseness
leading to another, till he is in a wood of the soul, tangled in sin. It
only wants that he be false to Silvia, too. Passion makes his eyes a
little blinder for an instant. He adds that treachery to the others.
Power to see clearly is the only cure for passion. Discovery gives that
power. Valentine's words--
"Who should be trusted now, when one's right hand
Is perjured to the bosom? Proteus,
I am sorry I must never trust thee more,
But count the world a stranger for thy sake.
The private wound is deepest...."
followed so soon by Julia's words--
"Behold her that gave aim to all thy oaths,
And entertained them deeply in her heart:
How oft hast thou with perjury cleft the root....
It is the lesser blot, modesty finds,
Women to change their shapes, than men their minds"--
rouse Proteus to the confounding instant of self-recognition. His answer
is like a voice from one of the later plays. It is in Shakespeare's
grand manner. It does not read like a piece of revision done in the
poet's maturity; but as though Shakespeare suddenly found his utterance
in a moment of vision--
"Than men their minds! 'tis true. O heaven! Were man
But constant, he were perfect: that one error
Fills him with faults; makes him run through all the sins:
Inconstancy falls off, ere it begins."
A word of excuse would brand him as base. He is ashamed and guilty; but
not base. He cannot say more than that he is sorry, and this only to
Valentine. Valentine accepts sorrow with the utterance of one of the
religious ideas which seem to have been constantly in Shakespeare's
mind.
"By penitence the Eternal's wrath's appeased."
His conduct towards Proteus after this forgiveness is so wise with
delicate tact that the reader is reminded of Shelley's treatment of
Hogg, in a similar case.
The suggestion of the character of Silvia has an austere beauty. The two
gentlemen are limited by the play's needs. The figure of Valentine is
the more complete of the two. He is an interesting study of one of those
grave young men who, when tested by life, show themselves wise beyond
their years. Among the minor characters, that of Eglamour, an image of
constancy to a dead woman, is the most beautiful. He is one of the
strange, many-sorrowed souls, vowed to an idea, to whom Shakespeare's
characters so often turn when the world bears hard. The low comedy of
Launce could hardly be lower; but his phrase "the other squirrel" (in